Suchergebnisse

This book investigates how people in countries with different medical and educational systems understand numerical and graphical information, which presentation formats help them better understand the information, and how they use the data to make decisions.

The literature on human-computer interaction consistently stresses the importance of reducing the cognitive effort required by users who interact with a computer in order to improve the experience and enhance usability and comprehension. Applying this perspective to Web surveys, questionnaire designers are advised to strive for layouts that facilitate the response process and reduce the effort required to select an answer. In this paper, we examine whether placing the answer boxes (i.e., radio buttons or check boxes) to the left or to the right of the answer options in closed questions with vertically arranged response categories enhances usability and facilitates responding. First, we discuss a set of opposing principles of how respondents may process these types of questions in Web surveys, some suggesting placing the answer boxes to the left and others suggesting placing them to the right side of the answer options. Second, we report an eye-tracking experiment, which examined whether Web survey responding is best described by one or another of these principles, and consequently whether one of three layouts is preferable in terms of usability: (1) answer boxes to the left of left-aligned answer options, (2) answer boxes to the right of left-aligned answer options, and (3) answer boxes to the right of right-aligned answer options. Our results indicate that the majority of respondents conform to a principle suggesting placing the answer boxes to the left of left-aligned answer options. Moreover, respondents require less cognitive effort (operationalized by response latencies, fixation times, fixation counts, and number of gaze switches between answer options and answer boxes) to select an answer in this layout.

SignificanceMuch of online conversation today consists of signaling ones political identity. Although many signals are obvious to everyone, others are covert, recognizable to ones ingroup while obscured from the outgroup. This type of covert identity signaling is critical for collaborations in a diverse society, but measuring covert signals has been difficult, slowing down theoretical development. We develop a method to detect covert and overt signals in tweets posted before the 2020 US presidential election and use a behavioral experiment to test predictions of a mathematical theory of covert signaling. Our results show that covert political signaling is more common when the perceived audience is politically diverse and open doors to a better understanding of communication in politically polarized societies.

Abstract
Traditionally, election polls have asked for participants' own voting intentions. In four elections, we previously found that we could improve predictions by asking participants how they thought their social circles would vote. A potential concern is that the social-circle question might predict results less well in elections with larger numbers of political options because it becomes harder to accurately track how social contacts plan to vote. However, we now find that the social-circle question performs better than the own-intention question in predicting two elections with many political parties: The Netherlands' 2017 general election and the Swedish 2018 general election.